Peppermint Energy, based in a South Dakota, has developed a portable, plug-and-play solar generator called the FORTY2.
Described as a solar plant in a suitcase, the FORTY2 draws enough juice from the sun to power lights, laptops — even a dorm fridge. A battery stashes power and delivers it after sundown.
Originally a cool product idea for tailgaters and campers, this quickly became a potential life changing source of energy for developing countries where three billion people live without reliable electricity. That means medicine that requires refrigeration could reach places it couldn't go before. The device could also spark commerce in remote areas as entrepreneurs find ways to monetize free reliable power.
Watch the story behind this remarkable device and how Stratasys 3D printing based on FDM™ technology using ABS plastic delivered a durable full scale prototype. Just one of the prototyping benefits - Peppermint decided to make the whole device even smaller than intended after carrying the first prototype proved awkward.
The industry’s only continuous tone full-color plastic 3D printer
Combine the Power of Vibrant Full Color With Durable Plastic Materials
The ProJet® 4500 gives you the power to make ready-to-use, flexible, strong parts, colored pixel by pixel, with superior surface quality. This office-friendly 3D printer is quick and efficient, and features intuitive operation controls, so you can ensure high productivity and cut operating costs.
Combine outer beauty with inner toughness and have durable, full-colour plastic parts right out of the printer from the ProJet 4500. Using ColorJet printing technology and the VisiJet® C4 Spectrum™ plastic material, the ProJet 4500 allows you to quickly create true-to-life prototypes of your end product, accurately display vital features, and produce high-resolution, customized end-use products.
The ProJet 4500 prints fast, generates minimal waste, requires no supports and delivers ready-to-use, full-color, functional parts and assemblies without post-processing or painting. This category-defining 3D printer is ideal for consumer products, home furnishings, healthcare, toys and collectibles companies, and completely shifts the paradigm for professionals engaged in architectural modeling, marketing communications, fashion design and more. Safe for office, easy-to-use, sustainable to operate and fast to print on, the ProJet 4500 is economical and comes with fully integrated material recycling for greater yield and better total material usage.
Unlike conventional additive manufacturing techniques, with ARBURG Plastic Freeforming (AKF) standard granulates are melted as in the injection moulding process. The freeformer produces the component without support structures, layer by layer from minuscule droplets. The discharge unit with nozzle remains stationary, while the component carrier moves.
The globally unique AKF process makes use of 3D CAD files, which are read in directly by the freeformer. After start-up, everything else takes place automatically. A nozzle closure with piezo technology builds up the desired component layer by layer from minuscule plastic droplets. During this process, the item under construction is moved by a component carrier with three or five axes.
- Unique: fully functional parts are created with minuscule plastic droplets, without a mould
- Versatile: low-cost standard granulates are used instead of expensive special materials
- No support structures: stationary discharge unit and moving component carrier for complex 3D geometries
- Combinable: AKF is also suitable for processing two components, e.g. in moving hard/soft combinations
- Effortless: parts are automatically built up layer by layer on the basis of 3D CAD files
"The Merlin Project is a 7,120,000 EUR research project that will be conducted by Rolls Royce in conjunction with other aircraft engine manufacturers. The aim of the project is to over the course of three years explore the use of 3D printing to make aircraft engines in order to reduce their environmental impact. The project aims to use 3D printing “to allow environmental benefits including near 100% material utilization current buy to fly ratios result in massive amounts of waste, no toxic chemical usage and no tooling costs, to impact the manufacture of future aero engine components. All of these factors will drastically reduce emissions across the life-cycle of the parts. …. Light-weighting, and the performance improvement of parts will result in reduced fuel consumption and reduced emissions….Impacts will include the development of high value, disruptive AM technologies capable of step changes in performance which will safeguard EU companies in the high value aero engine manufacturing field. AM will significantly reduce waste in an industry where materials require massive amounts of energy and toxic chemicals, in-process toxic chemical usage will be massively reduced, and emissions will drop because of the reduced amount of material involved.”
Spray technologies are particularly attractive for the production of large structures, which are challenging for today’s powder-bed additive manufacturing processes due to equipment size limitations.
The cold spray technique has the potential to scale up to build larger parts, with the only limitation being the size of the area over which metal powders can be applied.
Cold spray—also known as 3D painting—demonstrates a unique marriage of materials, process, and product function which can, in the immediate future, transform repair processes for industrial and aircraft components such as rotors, blades, shafts, propellers, and gear boxes.
Since cold spray does not require heat, like common repair processes such as welding, it allows a repaired part to be restored close to its original condition. In GE’s Oil and Gas business, GE researchers are exploring cold spray as an alternate way to repair or coat parts involved in oil and gas drilling and turbo machinery.
Cold spray’s future benefits include extended product lifespan and reduced manufacturing time and material costs, all of which translate into significant customer benefits.
See the Slow Mo Guys film GE researchers demonstrate a process called "cold spray", in which metal powders are sprayed at high velocities to build a part or add material to repair an existing part. GE researchers are exploring this 3D painting technology as an alternate way to repair or coat parts involved in oil and gas drilling and turbo machinery. To see the process on film, the Slow Mo Guys spray copper particles 10 times bigger than normally used for this process.
Over the last decade, engineers at GE Aviation have been experimenting with a new way to make jet engine parts. Rather than cutting, milling and drilling engine components, they weld together thin layers of powdered metal with a 200-watt laser and build parts from the ground up. Now, other businesses are supersizing 3D printing and pushing the technology into new areas.
GE Power and Water recently acquired a laser printer that is five times as powerful as the GE Aviation machine and can work with two lasers at the same time. “We are learning how to use this technology,” says Jon Schaeffer, senior manager for materials and processing engineering for Power and Water. “We’ve got to spread the word and change the design paradigm that metallurgists, designers and manufacturing teams have had for a long time.”
Schaeffer says that the 3D printer will help speed up innovation and test new ideas and designs faster. “We’ve been able to embed new technologies into our components without the messy manufacturing steps normally required,” he says. “We are cutting out months in the development cycle with this technology.”
The printer’s build area is almost a cubic foot, large enough to print gas turbine parts. “The biggest thing that was holding us back was the size of the chamber,” Schaeffer says. “But the chamber volume has grown 50 times over the last five years. It’s almost like Moore’s law for 3D printing.”
Schaeffer, who started at GE two decades ago in GE Aviation, points to his former colleagues as a model for making advanced technologies work. GE Aviation is already printing nozzles for the next-generation LEAP jet engine. Each nozzle used to made from 18 parts welded together. It is now grown as a single piece that is 25 percent lighter than its predecessor.
David Joyce, president and CEO of GE Aviation, says that the technology liberated his business from the limitations of machining. “It gives the designer a whole different palette of colors to paint with, and truly on a whole new canvas,” Joyce says.
Engineers at Power and Water have already used their new machine to design and print a cooling shroud for GE’s latest gas turbine. “There was a time when we could not test new designs and technologies in new parts because we were not able to make them,” Schaeffer says. “3D printing is pointing engineers in the right direction to see if they’ve got a successful concept. It’s really quite exciting.”
